This page contains links for downloading and installing/upgrading to Ferret V5.0. The links are all file links and you should be able to use the "save as" ... or "save link as" ... options from within your browser to save the files locally.

Download fer50.zip here. Be sure to use binary mode transfers if you must move it from a PC to the OpenVMS system. Unzip on the OpenVMS system (a version of unzip is available on the "other useful files" link above). The zip file includes a readme file with more detailed instructions. Ferret V5.0 is not currently available for VAX.

Download fer51.zip here - the first version of Ferret which includes an Itanium distribution. Unzip on the OpenVMS system (a version of unzip is available on the "other useful files" link above). The zip file includes a readme file with more detailed instructions. Ferret V5.1 is not currently available for VAX.

The Ferret V5.0 User Manual is available in Adobe's .PDF format (public document format). It can be downloaded here; FER50USE.PDF.

If you receive a number of linker error messages during installation beginning with dfor$ you do not have a copy of the current Fortran run-time libraries installed; these libraries must be installed for Ferret V5.0. To check if you have a Fortran RTL installed before the installation:

$ product show history for*

you should see at least forrtl V7.3. If your version is older than this you should upgrade these RTL; since they are included with OpenVMS the run-time libraries should be on your OpenVMS media and there is no license or fees involved. If you do not have a Fortran RTL installed you must install one BEFORE installing Ferret V5.0. After installing them you should log out and log back in before beginning the Ferret V5.0 installation/upgrade.

To obtain a permanent V5 license contact Norma at 800-561-8876 or via e-mail to sales@saiga.com.

Release notes

Ferret V5.0 includes all changes and enhancements made since Ferret V4.1 was released.

In addition the following new features have been added:

Several more checks are made for bad passwords during the audit report. All of the following checks are also performed with the suspect password reversed. These include SYSUAF account name, SYSUAF owner name (spaces removed), SYSUAF owner name (spaces changed to underbars "_") and if there is more than 1 word/name in the SYSUAF owner name each of them is also individually tested.

Several text fields in the SYSUAF could not have " " (blank) specified as a criteria for reporting. This problem has been fixed for the following fields: account, cli, clitables, data, device, directory, lgicmd, owner and username. For example to find all SYSUAF records with no owner:

$Ferret /report /list=(user,owner) /owner=" "

or to find all records where the user data field is not blank

$Ferret /report /list=(user,data) /data=("-"," ")

this problem has not been reported by a customer but was found during testing. It's assumed that it was introduced by a change in one of the system string matching routines.

The ferret help file was completely reviewed and a number of minor errors fixed.

Previous versions of Ferret had a limit of 5,000 entries in the bad passwords file; there is now no limit

A dictionary of passwords published on a security site containing passwords that the author found in multiple password cracking programs has been included. This list, of almost 5,000 entries, can be used as an extra check to help guarantee that users do not have easily guessed passwords set. Since checking all these passwords takes a significant amount of resources the default list is still used and a new qualifier, /password_file, has been added to allow users to specify this enhanced dictionary, or their own dictionary. We recommend running the audit report, with this larger dictionary specified, periodically. The new dictionary is called bad_passwd_dictionary.dat.

Report specification files have had three enhancements made with this release:

if the first line of the specification file is NOHEAD the report will be generated as a flat ASCII file with no headings or page breaks. Previously a logical name had to be defined to supress headings and all reports would be generated as flat files as long as it was defined.

In previous versions of Ferret UICs were reported in their ASCII text representation by default; to have them displayed as numeric values the /type=numeric qualifier was necessary. A new specification item, octal_uic, has been added which will add the UIC in numeric format to the report. It is possible to specify both UIC and OCTAL_UIC in the same report to have UICs included in both formats.

the size of each individual report item can now be control in the specification file by following the item with a comma and the field size desired. For example the following specification file is generated as a flag file, with no headings or page breaks, and the device, directory and clitables fields are all set to be smaller than the ferret default values.

NOHEAD

USERNAME

UIC

OCTAL_UIC

I_LASTLOGIN

N_LASTLOGIN

LOGFAILS

EXPIRATION

DEVICE,8

DIRECTORY,10

CLITABLES,5

it is now possible to specify a UIC range for selection criteria. Simply specify the starting value, in octal, a colon and the ending value, also octal. Ranges can be specified for UIC groups, UIC members or both. For example to specify UIC members 1 to 10 of the UIC groups 100 to 777:

/UIC="[100:777,1:10]"

a list of values can still be entered, however, a range cannot include a wildcard. The following is a valid example:

/UIC=("[100,*]","[250:300,1:10]","[1000,475]")

while this is not valid:

/UIC=("[100,*]","[250:300,*]","[1000,475]")

Patches

If you downloaded and installed V5.0 of Ferret before February 18, 2005, you may want to download the following file help.zip. It contains the V5.0 help file and help library (the one included in your kit was not complete) as well as the bad passwords file which may not have been copied to the ferret_dat directory during installation.